Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

253 Mathilde is the largest asteroid that has ever been visited by a spacecraft. It's held that distinction for more than twelve years, but next year it'll be upstaged by the considerably larger 21 Lutetia, which Rosetta will fly by on July 10.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've always loved advent calendars and the way they both managed and heightened my anticipation of the gift-opening frenzy of Christmas morning.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's a holiday and I'm enjoying time with the family, so rather than write a lot, I will let a spectacular image do the talking for me.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini imaging team have posted their own processed and captioned version of the Saturn's aurora movie that I posted a preview of about six weeks ago, and it was worth the wait.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, just wow. I didn't know what to expect from the second flyby of Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus in November, which happened yesterday.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a 4-frame mosaic of Enceladus images -- just another everyday spectacularly alien landscape.

Emily Lakdawalla

It really looks like the second attempt at driving Spirit out of the trap has had the hoped-for result: some forward progress (maybe about a centimeter), and no evidence for further downward sinking.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since tomorrow's class is going to be on playing with raw images from the rovers and Cassini, I've been playing with recent raw images from the rovers and Cassini! I just thought I'd share a couple of the fun items I've been working with.

Emily Lakdawalla

Even though all of us rover fans know that Spirit is really, really stuck, I think I'm not the only one who was secretly hoping that today's images downlinked from Spirit would show that the rover had magically popped out of the ground overnight. Of course, she didn't.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rosetta appears to have operated flawlessly as it streaked past Earth for its flyby early this morning. Here are a few more gems from the flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just hours away from its Earth flyby, Rosetta is busily snapping images and gathering other science data.

Emily Lakdawalla

This was a neat photo from ESA today.

Emily Lakdawalla

Heads up! ESA's Rosetta spacecraft is approaching for its last flyby of Earth, on Friday, November 13.

Emily Lakdawalla

Thanks to Mike Malaska for the tip on this one. The image is part of an animation that ends with Rhea transiting Saturn.

Emily Lakdawalla

On

Emily Lakdawalla

This image goodie was produced from the raw images from Cassini's close encounter with Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus yesterday by Gordan Ugarkovic.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, the Japanese space agency announced the public release of the data from the primary mission of the Kaguya (a.k.a. SELENE) lunar orbiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Raw images from Cassini's close pass by Enceladus today started appearing on the JPL raw images website, and some less-compressed versions of a few of them showed up on the CICLOPS website.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini recently captured a series of images documenting Rhea passing behind Titan.